I love this story from Peaceful Rise. It reads like a classic example of cultural differences in engineering and security. The author first describes the need for special effects in a movie:

For the burning village, the challenge would be to find someone who could manufacture the piping, and to figure out how to store and supply the set with such an absurd amount of fuel.

The author apparently left the project, due to other reasons, but he goes on to explain how an over-engineered solution was dismissed and the low-cost bid played out.

Not surprisingly, the American special effects team also left the project. I read that it was because their estimate of the cost to plumb the village with gas pipes was too high, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they intentionally gave a quote they knew would be too high just as an excuse to quit the movie and hurry on back to their American beachhouses. They were replaced by a Korean team who had a much more simple solution: douse the whole set and let it burn! As the story goes, a minute after they tossed the match and set the village up in flames, it occurred to someone in the production crew to inquire how they intended to douse the blaze. Put the fire out? That’s not our job, said the special effects crew. We set fires, we don’t put them out! The fire continued to spread to surrounding areas and grow out of control until finally emergency teams from a remote military film studio were able to arrive and control the blaze.

The requirement, if I read the story correctly was to create a fire that could be repeatably turned on, which seems to imply some kind of dousing mechanism. My guess is that the Americans started out with an assumption of an “effect” that was very different from the Korean crew. Or maybe it was just a case of high/low bid engineering. Anyway, it’s nice anecdote to share in my next presentation on culture and security.

It sounds similar to the story about American engineers that spent billions of dollars to design ink and a pen that could overcome zero gravity so astronauts could still take notes while on mission. The Russians, asked if and when they expected to achieve an engineering feat of similar magnitute, simply pointed out “we are ok with pencils”.